Start a New Game?

By Fearless Young Orphan In the Name of the King: A Tale (2007) Directed by

In the Name of the King has a 4% rating at rottentomatoes.com (based on 49 ratings).

Y’all know by now that I am an avid fan of computer gaming, my preference sticking pretty securely in role-playing games but allowing room into shooters, adventures, turned-based strategies, and so on. So of course I’ve played Dungeon Siege. It was a rather long time ago, but I remember that game as being fun as hell. First of all, for its time it had some of the loveliest environments I had seen – it would rain! There was snow! The forests were lush, the dungeons were oppressive. I, and everyone else who played the game, began as a simple farmer whose land was attacked unexpectedly by supernatural horrors. After fighting them off, the quest is to head out and fight, fight, fight, gathering a party of companions along the way until you had a team of badasses who could cut a bloody path to the end of the game. There was little dialog and none of the Bioware-style “see how many of your companions you can sex up” plotting; my team was merely a facet of my own desire to kill as efficiently as possible. If there was a plot, I scarcely remember it. What I do remember is this: An Evil threatens the land. Kill everything in your way until you get to it, then kill the Evil, and then you win!

Well that is just fine for a game, because the object was to form a killing team of such ruthless effectiveness that no monster pitched in my direction could stop me. I had to allocate resources and make sure everyone’s gear was the best it could be, and I had all these cool environments to discover and doors to unlock, and I was never in one environment for so long that it became tedious. I played through the game through three times, always enjoying myself. Nevertheless, it is a mystery to me why someone would choose it as the basis for a film, because there is barely enough plot to sustain what is basically an anal-retentive puzzle exercise, much less a film during which the audience can’t even pick out the characters’ gear. There are games out there that have extremely complicated mythologies, and to my knowledge Dungeon Siege is not one of them. The name more or less says it all: we siege dungeons.

But somebody decided to make a movie and then here comes Uwe Boll, who seems to be the go-to guy for making computer games into movies. Would you believe this is the first Uwe Boll-directed film I have seen? There’s a reason for that, because his films routinely are classified as “godawful bad” and I have so many films to watch, it doesn’t seem like a good use of viewing time.

And here I have to Hunk this thing? In the Name of the King is a terrible film in nearly every sense of the word. It is boring, the dialog is so lifeless and cliché that it makes clichés look bad, it is poorly edited into frequent incoherence, it blatantly copycats the Lord of the Rings trilogy’s imagery (more obviously than most movies, and unapologetically) and at a running time of two hours, it is an hour longer than it needs to be. I swear, it’s like they put a movie and its own sequel together into one package. But anyway, I have to Hunk this thing.

Plot, plot, where is the plot? I think I’ve already covered this. Evil threatens the land. Kill it. It is roughly the time and costume period of your average Renaissance Festival. stars as the ordinary slob whose life is seriously hampered by the Evil until he picks up a sword and starts kicking ass, Ron Perlman is one of his companions, Claire Forlani is Statham’s wife, Ray Liotta is the evil wizard causing all the shitstorms, John Rhys-Davies is the kingdom’s wizard, is the wizard’s battlemage daughter, freaking Burt Reynolds plays the KING, for crying out loud, and you’ll also catch Matthew Lillard as an over-the-top evil nephew to the king. What powers brought these accomplished actors into this film? Your guess is as good as mine. They all traipse up and down the countryside, arriving in forests, castles, Renaissance Festivals, cliffsides, Mordor, and the Shire without much sense as to the distances in between these places, and all manner of conflicts take place for which we have little interest in either the action or the outcome.

The main thread of the whole thing is that Jason Statham’s character, Farmer, was an orphaned waif and now he’s an honest farmer and he’s also Jason Stratham, so when his wife is abducted by the Orcs . . . um, the Krug, I mean . . . and his son his killed, he takes off on a quest to kill shit. Then it turns out he’s actually the son of the king and heir to the throne. Well, of course he is. Then there is an hour of battle scenes and then the movie is over. I highly recommend you bring along some knitting or a jigsaw puzzle to do while all this is going on, because you will need some damn thing to entertain yourself. Now for some more entertainment. It’s time to find five things to like.

1. For gamers like me, who actually played the original awesome Dungeon Siege, there are some moments of fun. These take place in the first half hour of the film, so feel free to skip the rest. Statham’s character of “Farmer” is in fact a nod to our starting avatar, and the attack on his farm does feel exactly like the opening of the game. Then he heads for Stonebridge, which is right in line with the game as well. At one point the king is pointing to map that matches many of the locations that we found in the game. That’s actually sort of neat and I did appreciate the warm fuzzies I got from remembering my own fun adventuring. However, after half an hour or so, any similarity between this movie and the game I loved was long gone.

2. Leelee Sobieski as Muriella is the most interesting character in the film. I’ve always liked this young actress and her daring film choices. Her character seems at first like a carbon copy of LoTR’s Eowyn: the noble young woman who wants to fight for her country and isn’t allowed, but there is more to her than that. She was seduced by the evil Ray Liotta and gave away secrets (I’m not sure what they were, though) that opened the floodgates for trouble. Now she feels bound to correct her mistake by joining in the fight. If she had been the film’s major character, things would have been significantly better. I like Jason Statham, but he is playing an empty space. Games need an empty space so that the player can put him or herself into the role; movies need a character.

3. Matthew Lillard’s evil Duke is so hammy and ridiculously stupidly greedy and ambitious and silly that he’s rather hilarious. I looked forward to seeing him just because I knew he’d do something funny. I got the feeling that the king kept him around for laughs.

4. Likewise with Burt Reynolds as the king. Now, I don’t think Reynolds meant to be funny, but it’s still funny. This is usually the role reserved for someone like Christopher Plummer or Ian McKellen, so putting Burt Reynolds in there is an unexpected kick in the head. And this movie, as bad as it is, needs as many kicks in the head as it can get.

5. General comedy in the form of badness. At least most of it is bad enough to laugh about, but you have to be with a like-minded friend. Watching this alone certainly must be torment worthy of a ring in Hell.

The film’s average rating at Rotten Tomatoes is 4%. Depends on how you look at it, but doesn’t it always? Yes, it’s a 4% if you expected it to be a good and coherent film. Goodness is harder for movies to catch; I do think coherence is something we should be able to expect regularly. For the sake of humor, I’d give In the Name of the King a 15%, but that’s all it gets from me, and it’s only because I played the game.